Going back to basics with sketching (an Ironhack exercise)
In my journey as an Ironhack student, I was presented with a sketching exercise and in this post I will share my experience with it.
For the exercises we had to sketch two talks, the first one being a TED Talk and the second one required going to a Meetup event.
For the TED talk, I watched “Why our screens make us less happy?” by Adam Alter and for my Meetup event, I went to an Ironhack talk in Barcelona called “Service design. A designer toolbox in a connector’s mindset” by Lourenço Viana.
First let me say, that I’m not used to sketching. I was more familiar with it in elementary school when a teacher will ask us to make mind maps as homework to summarized what we have learnt during the day, so I knew that this technique will no come naturally since it had been a long time and it would mean to me going back to basics.
For the TED talk, my automatic response was to take notes. This left me with just a bunch of plain text and a feeling that I have not absorbed everything important.
I watched the talk a second time and gave sketchnoting another go. I knew this time I had to be more focused on sketching and this allow me to engage more. I drew more, an although my drawings were far from perfect, making them made the process more enjoyable.
In this second attempt, I took advices from the “The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking” by Mike Rohde. I recommend this book for everyone that wants to give this note taking technique a chance, I personally enjoyed the tips it gave on how to draw faces and expressions.
For the “Service design. A designer toolbox in a connector’s mindset” event, the process went easier since I knew that my focus had to be on taking notes, drawing as much as I could and focus on beautifying everything later.
Sketchnoting can be a lot of fun. This is a method that in my opinion allows to retain more information. My advice for anyone that wants to start making taking notes more fun is to remind themselves that is ok to make mistakes, we just got to cross it over and continue (your personal notes do not need to perfect!).
You can find my not so beautiful sketchnotes in this story. They are not the best, but I really enjoyed the process of making them.
